A journalist and frequent contributor to mainstream newspapers, seven months before his death he published a commentary in the Los Angeles Times. In it, he said:

 

 

One of Burciaga's best known poems is Stammerred Dreams (having had the unique experience of listening to him perform it is one of life's most treasured moments). The poem is written exactly as it would be read by someone stammering. The irony, of course, is in the reference it evokes to "problems of communication" -- a problem that Chicanas/os and immigrants know too well.

 

 

The poem swirls around one's heart like a litany of dreams, slowly building up to a disarming realization: the stammerer is an immigrant who longs for home:

 

 

In Undocumented Love, Burciaga included explanatory notes for each poem. He breaks his usual modesty and tells us about Stammered Dreams that it was a poem many respected authors --Arturo Islas, Dianne Middlebrook, and Lorna Dee Cervantes, amon others-- really liked. One poet in Mexico said it was the most moving poem he had ever heard. A critic in Mexico described it as "the voice of the Chicano unable to express himself." Tony adds, "I agree, but my primary objective was in describing the frustrating exasperation of life in this day and age."  In this comment, Tony --the militant Chicano activist--opts to represent his art as a more universal, humanistic expression than simply an ethnic manifesto.

 

Burciaga's language games frequently involved references (made-up faux versions mostly) of the ancestral tongue of Chicanos: Nahuatl. In Burciaga's take, however, irreverence (not nostalgia) commanded the Chicano imaginary. In the poem/parody Poema en Tres Idiomas y Calo he complicates the Chicana/o's lingual abilities X 4:

 

 

It's hard to pick the right sampling here to convey the full range of this poetic provocador, but his poems in Chicano Calo represent an absolutely underappreaciated treasure that not many have had the resolve to tackle (as a matter of fact a quick search of dissertations completed in the last 12 years revealed none devoted to the work of Burciaga). In this arena, his Credo de Aztlan is among the best of the genre:

 

 

(Burciaga offered no translation of any of the Calo terms in his poems)

 

And again, in his Letania en Calo, we hear:

 

Libranos Se�or...

The first time he read this poem in public, Tony tells us in his confessional notes, he was dressed like a priest. In this sense, we are reminded of the theatrics that were always a part of Chicano/a poetry, making it thus the antecedents of performance art as we know it today.  Of the poem he says: "This litany is not only a satire, but, it is also a very real theology of liberation."

 

Mocking English pronunciation assumes in Burciaga's repertoire a particularly politized dimension, but he never abandons the humor that makes the point more effectively than didacticism. In this sense, his linguistic strategies align with what scholar Frances Aparicio has termed the "tropicalization"  phenomenon of Latino/a fiction and poetry. In a sense, rather than designed to humiliate the Opressor for resistance's sake, the goal is to transform and re-write "the Anglo signifiers from the Latino cultural vantage point." Here's Tony doing his thing in the poem In Commemoration of the USA Bicentennial:

 

 

 

Ocassionally, Burciaga would write about his own subject position as a wrriter/activist. In one poem entitled The Truth he riffs:

 

 

And we....Tony (desde la luz from which you watch us struggle to keep hope aflame) are grateful you never stopped: yelling, writing, painting. Gracias!!